


badr al dine

by edwardnygmas



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Underage Drinking, boris dad is an asshole, the painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-19 02:33:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22603762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edwardnygmas/pseuds/edwardnygmas
Summary: Boris recounts his and Theo's life in Las Vegas; the ups, downs, and the first time he heard "I love you".
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 2
Kudos: 56





	badr al dine

Thinking back, Potter was the first person to tell me he loved me. 

And he doesn’t even remember it. 

But I do, I remember almost every detail of it, even all these years later.

It was a phrase I never grew up hearing, especially not from my father. It’s why I was sometimes jealous of Potter, just a little. I knew we both had it rough at home, but he hated his dad so much and for what? He was at least trying to make an effort in his life, even I could see it. He would talk to us about his old movies and take us out for dinner, how lucky to have something like that! But Potter hated him, and his enemy was my enemy. 

It was just hard going from their house back to mine, having to slink back to my room before my father decided to use me as his fucking punching bag. It was simply something I was used to; his drunken rages and violent fits, then his half assed apologies the next time I saw him. It usually wasn’t even an apology, just a few dollars slipped under my door and then he’d be gone for the next however many days. 

But hey, that’s life. 

I guess it just became different when I met him. I had made friends before, but we move so much I don’t like to get too close to anyone. But Potter and I became inseparable, and I grew close to him in a way I never was with anyone else before. I told him things that I’d only ever thought to myself, and he listened. But it wasn’t like he just listened to me when I talked, he actually cared. And I can’t think of anyone else in my life I could say that about. 

Sometimes I regret introducing him to drugs. 

I had been using them for years, developed a sort of tolerance. For me, drugs were a way to escape from whatever shit was going on with my father or a way to zone out at school. It was fun for me, but I realized with Potter that drugs sometimes brought out the worst in him. Don’t get me wrong, it was great fun most of the time, laughing at nothing and everything until our ribs hurt and falling into his dad’s pool to float and stare into the sky for hours. But he was sad, he was always sad, and sometimes the drugs made him a different person. He’d cry over his mother a lot, and fuck, I can understand that. But he blamed himself for her death, and he’d tell me over and over how he deserved to die, and then he’d really try to hurt himself. 

And then he wouldn’t remember. 

He didn’t remember more than half the shit he did while drunk or high, but I do. 

And I was always there for him. Like I said before, it was not always bad, but when he vomited all over the bed I cleaned the sheets; I made him eat and I helped him shower. For anyone else, it would have felt like a burden, but I wanted to look out for him.

And in a way, he looked out for me too. 

When we practically lived together, it was Potter that did the cooking. He’d walk me through the recipes and pretend he was on one of those American cooking shows, then ask me to rate his dish. I remember once we were flipping through the channels at his house, and the food network came on. There was this recipe for some kind of chicken and pasta dish, real fancy and shit, and I said something along lines of “what I wouldn’t give to eat like that every day.” The next day, we rode the bus into town and did our weekly haul from the supermarket, and he fucking made the dish for me that night. Noted, it was nothing like on the tv; Potter substituted top ramen for the pasta and didn’t know how to season the chicken, but it meant the world to me at the time. Because for one thing, I simply wasn’t used to being cooked for. I’ve had to provide for myself for as long as I can remember, and growing up, I went hungry most of the time. But with Potter, it was always “are you hungry Boris?” or “what should we eat today Boris?” The other thing was that he listened to me, like really listened in a way I wasn’t used to. Maybe I just never felt comfortable opening up to others, but he’d let me drunkenly rant for hours and didn’t pity me. 

Being pitied is the worst feeling, to me at least. It’s why I never told anyone else about my dad, but Potter understood. He knew what it was like to have an asshole father, and hell, he let me camp out at his house for weeks at a time. 

He had spent the night at my place a few times when we first became friends, but it was the first time I stayed over at his that I learned about his nightmares. Well, maybe not learned, he had told me when we were stoned before, “Sometimes I have nightmares so bad I wake up unable to breathe”. 

I’m a light sleeper, I have to be in case my dad shows up out of nowhere in the middle of the night, or the cops. I remember waking up one night to Potter crying, and it was the first time I had seen him cry like that. (But not the last by far) He was curled in a ball, chest heaving as he struggled to breathe, and I instinctively moved closer to him, feeling his hands trembling. In the moment, I would have done anything in my power to make him feel better, and Potter is the only person I can say that about, I can admit I’m a selfish bastard. I moved closer to him and wrapped my arms around him, sang him a Ukranian song that he couldn’t have understood if he was awake to hear it, and wouldn’t remember the next day even if he was awake. 

That was the other thing with him, drugs fucked with his memory big time.

Hey, maybe he just chose to block out the bad, but after every suicide attempt or nightmare, he’d go on as if nothing happened the next day.

One of the worst cases was this one time we were watching Star Wars at his house. We had “borrowed” some of Xandra’s pills, I still don’t know exactly what they were but combined with the vodka I had brought, we were fucked up. Long story short, Potter gets real quiet toward the end of the movie, then starts crying. Not like the loud crying fits that come with his nightmares, these were just silent tears streaming down his face, and he just looked so fucking broken. I asked him what was wrong, and he said so quietly that he couldn’t bear to live another day living with his guilt. I tried to cheer him up, but he eventually walked out to the pool and jumped in. I thought he was just fucking around, but he didn’t come back inside, and when I finally went out after him, he was floating underwater like a fucking corpse. The bastard tried to drown himself, and I had to pull his body out of the water and give him CPR. I can talk about it now, but in the moment, I was sure he was dead, and I was losing it. Even when he came to, spitting water everywhere, I couldn’t control my tears. I had never cried in front of him before, not even when my dad fucked me up and Potter had to bandage me up, but the thought of him dying and me not being able to save him was too much for me, and I remember hugging him so close and so tight and wanting to never leave his side. And the next day, you know what? He says “Boris, let’s swim.” I said something like “Are you kidding? After yesterday?” 

“What do you mean yesterday? All we did was watch like thirty minutes of Star Wars and then pass the fuck out on my couch for the rest of the day!” 

I was shocked, but as time went on, that just became a routine happening. 

And that’s why it’s so bittersweet that he told me that he loved me. He’ll never remember and yet here I am, thinking about it years later. 

It wasn’t even on one of his worst days, that’s the thing. It was on one of mine. 

It was a case of me being in the wrong place at the wrong time when my dad showed up one night, but thankfully Potter wasn’t there. He was the one who found me the next morning though; I didn’t show up to school so he skipped class and came to the house. It wasn’t the worst thing my dad had ever done, not by far, but he had fractured my ankle with his cane so when Potter showed up, I was still lying on the floor where I had been left the last night. I didn’t cry; I trained myself to never cry at something my dad did to me, no matter how badly it hurt, but from the look on Potter’s face, I knew I must have looked pretty rough. He helped me stand, let me throw my arm around his shoulder and hobble with him to my room, where he gently set me on the bed. It was always something I noticed about him, because this was not the first nor the last time he was there after an episode with my dad, his gentleness and soft touches. 

Potter and I were rough a lot of the time, hitting or pushing each other around, but sometimes he’d be so soft and gentle, and I never knew what to do or say. It would be at the most random times, like in the middle of the night once I woke to him smoking a cigarette in bed and running his fingers through my hair, or another time after we had just swam and were laying side by side on the ground and he was brushing his thumb up and down my arm carelessly. He could be awfully intimate sometimes, and I never got quite used to it, probably because I grew up solitary and never had that kind of companionship. But for all the times I took care of him, he took care of me too. My house didn’t have much, but he got a wet towel and took my face in his hands while I protested. 

“Potter, I’m fine.” 

“You don’t deserve this, he’s an asshole.” 

I remember how he held my hair back with one hand and wiped the blood from my face with the other. 

“I can take care of myself.” 

“I know.” 

He continued wiping my face, and when he was done he sat down on the bed next to me. We were both quiet for a few minutes, and then he hugged me, and while we were in each other’s arms he said it. Unprompted. Vulnerable. 

“I love you.” 

I didn’t need to say it back. 

Maybe I should have, but I think he knew. 

And the worst part wasn’t that he forgot he said it because he blacked out a few hours later. 

It wasn’t that he never said it again. 

The worst part was when he left. 

That I let him go, knowing I had stolen something irreplaceable to him. 

But he was gone, and it felt like he took a part of me with him even though it was me who had taken a literal part of him. For weeks I stayed in his room, not wanting to wash the sheets or change anything. I knew I would never have someone in my life like him ever again, and I hated myself for not going with him to New York. I knew I could go if I wanted to, meet him there, but I had screwed everything up by taking his fucking painting. I found myself looking at it every day; sometimes at nights when I was especially fucked up or things with my dad got bad I would take the painting out and hold it tightly to my chest, and go to sleep with it clutched in my arms. I remembered one time Potter was drunkenly telling me a story his mother told him in his childhood, about looking at the moon whenever you’re sad and lonely because the moon is the same everywhere. I didn’t get it when he told me at first, but I think I do now. 

It’s been a few years since I’ve seen him, and I know that I’ll probably never see him again. I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing him and having him hate me when I love him so much. And I do love him, I love him more than anything else in the fucking world. But all I have now to remind me of him is the Goldfinch, and I know I must have broken his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> writing from boris' pov is harder than I thought... but hopefully u enjoyed <3


End file.
